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Discussion on the vid wars of skaters by fans.

Hi!

So I'm a new figure skating fan. I watched it during the Vancouver Winter Olympics and absolutely fell in love with the sport, the figure skaters and just the artistic aspect of it. I've been watching many more figure skating videos online now and to be honest I'm still not quite sure how things work with scoring etc.

I'm very confused with all this controversy surrounding Mao and Yuna. I know it's a country rivalry thing, but I was shocked to see even the country news media (Japanese especially.. or at least they were the ones I found on Youtube) projecting negative reports on the skaters.

Seeing so many comments/videos about how Kim Yuna is over scored and is not as exceptional as reported, I was wondering if any of you more experienced skating fans can say something about it.

Thanks!!

Edit:
Thank you everyone for your reply. Both Mao and Yuna are excellent skaters, and I guess I was too naive when I was perusing Youtube. I also didn't realize there has been so much 'hate' for so many skaters like Kwan (who I always thought no one hated) or Patrick.

not again
I am sick of the Kim overscored debate , the answer is NO
Yuna's technical abilities alone is far ahead than any other veteran ladies
her PCS is the highest because and she has one the best speed

ohwhylime, Youtube videos and their associated comments are not always the most reliable source of accurate information, particularly when it comes to the Kim-Asada rivalry. A more accurate way to learn more about scoring is to read the technical handbooks and such that are easily accessible on the ISU's website: http://www.isu.org/vsite/vnavsite/pa...v-list,00.html

I've been a skating fan for years, but I'm not very good at the subtleties of technique. And even I can tell the difference between YuNa's jumps and those of just about every other lady. When I watched her long program at the Olympics, the triple-triple she did looked as if she had jets in her skates--it was that big. In terms of flow, arms, and so on, I'd give the edge to Mao, but in terms of just about everything else, YuNa left everyone else in the dust. So I think you can rest easy that YuNa is marked so high because she really is that good.

Under CoP, a fantastic skater who botches a couple of jumps can come out a winner against mediocre skaters with mediocre jumps, but s/he won't be able to own the win because there will be fans who protest it. So in order for a skater to take pride in the victory, s/he has to land at least most of the jumps. This would be the case even if the competition was adequately judged. Looking at how Patrick is behaving lately, it's clear his multiple fall wins last year did influence him mentally in a bad kind of way.
Now, if the competition is poorly judged, and YouTube can point this out backed by footage, well, that's even worse. CoP suffers, credility of figure skating as a sports suffers, the skater (of course) is mentally scarred, etc. It's just bad all around.

Under CoP, a fantastic skater who botches a couple of jumps can come out a winner against mediocre skaters with mediocre jumps, but s/he won't be able to own the win because there will be fans who protest it.

Under 6.0, a fantastic skater who botched a couple of jumps could come out a winner against mediocre skaters with mediocre jumps. That's the nature of the sport. Fans got outraged back then as well. Sometimes skaters were embarrassed to win with multiple falls.

At least now the protocols let us see where skater with the falls made up the difference, instead of just ascribing the discrepancy to politics or blind judges.

The videos that you are looking at are several years old now. Things have calmed down quite a bit in the fan wars between the "Maosketeers" and the "Yuna dholes" When Yu-na Kim and Mao Asada were fighting it out for World and Olympic championships the figure skating boards were full of shouting matches by youthful partisans who wanted to re-fight World War II.

This is a bit of a "whitewash" of what really happened on Youtube (not the FS forums) over the years. And World War II is not the correct war to use in your metaphor.

Assuming the OP is sincere in wanting to know what was going on, here are some highlights from what happened over the last Olympic quad, all based on my own experience, all things I saw for myself, a figure skating fan online who searches for videos on Youtube.

Essentially, there was/is a group of crazies out there who are not fans of Yu-Na (to put it lightly). I would say starting in 2007 (which is when Yu-Na emerged as a true contender), they have done their best to flood Youtube with videos to create doubt about Yu-Na's ability as a skater. They slow-mo her jumps. They freeze them at whatever point they choose in order to present her as a cheater. They tag their videos with the names of as many popular skaters as possible, so they show up in lots of results.

Not surprisingly, it got worse after Yu-Na won 2009 Worlds. Through that summer and that fall, I couldn't even search for Yu-Na without getting sick. Look, I went through Michelle vs. Sasha battles--that was NOTHING compared to this. These people made Sasha (or Michelle fans) look like toddlers fighting over toys. These people were out to destroy Yu-Na's reputation on Youtube. They created the videos in the hopes that new fans to the sport would find it and think, "Hey, maybe Yu-Na's not so great."

They took innocuous, awkward moments (like when Yu-Na appeared on Battle of the Blades to skate James Bond, and got awkwardly stuck outside of a group hug by the cast) and labeled it as an example of Kim Yuna being "HATED BY THE SKATERS OF THE WORLD."

It didn't end with the Olympics, either. This group of crazies actually went around spamming a bunch of sites saying that since Yu-Na wore a name brand of earrings that she had broken some ISU rule that her OGM should be taken away. It died soon after, but YES, this actually happened.

What else? Probably the worst thing that I saw happen was that they periodically went after huge numbers of Yu-Na's most popular videos. I could see it happen as videos I had favorited disappeared off of Youtube because of "copyright infringement" even as videos of other skaters remained online. The copyright infringement would be done in the name of "SBS" or other companies even when those companies had done no such thing. These crazies were trying to basically delete Yu-Na off of Youtube.

One of the sad cases was when one specific youtube user, who had been inactive since like 2006, gogi, had their channel deleted...I think in 2010. All they had was popular videos of Yu-Na when she was a junior. it was quite pathetic that those haters out there were so despicable that they had to go after the videos that showed her wonderful junior performances.

That's why, btw, when you search for Yu-Na videos now of a specific performance, you'll likely find TONS of duplicates of the same performance. Yu-na fans took action and started backing up videos, uploading tons and tons of videos in order to counteract the deleting. Maybe it seems silly, but again, if you saw the Yu-na videos disappearing, then you'd understand.

As for the flip side, yes, there are some crazy rabid fans of Yu-Na, and they went overboard in reacting to events (the "impeding" incident) and made their own videos in retaliation, which just made things worse. They were totally wrong and should never have done it. They also contributed slow-mo videos of Mao's triple axels. Again, totally wrong. And once I saw a bizarro person upload Yu-Na's FS and label it as Mao's FS. Ridiculous.

I hate what the rabid "fans" did on Youtube. But i doubt anyone has gotten more crazy videos posted about them as Yu-Na has. As a skating fan since 1992, I've never seen anything like this. I was a Michelle fan and saw plenty of fan wars back in the day...but in comparison to this, they made Michelle/Sasha/Tara/Irina/Sarah fans look like babies. Oh, but then again, there is that one crazy Michelle troll who for YEARS posted nasty comments on all of her videos (getrealandsee/ithinkformyself/etc). Bleh, there are crazies in every fandom.

But whatever, it doesn't matter, because Yu-Na is still an Olympic champion, the whole world saw her win it gloriously, and no one can ever rewrite the past to take it away from her. So the haters can just drown in their own bitterness.

Originally Posted by hurrah

Under CoP, a fantastic skater who botches a couple of jumps can come out a winner against mediocre skaters with mediocre jumps, but s/he won't be able to own the win because there will be fans who protest it. So in order for a skater to take pride in the victory, s/he has to land at least most of the jumps. This would be the case even if the competition was adequately judged. Looking at how Patrick is behaving lately, it's clear his multiple fall wins last year did influence him mentally in a bad kind of way.
Now, if the competition is poorly judged, and YouTube can point this out backed by footage, well, that's even worse. CoP suffers, credility of figure skating as a sports suffers, the skater (of course) is mentally scarred, etc. It's just bad all around.

That has nothing to do with what the OP is asking about. The videos posted on Youtube in question don't back up anything regarding poor judging--they are propaganda videos made by fans of one skater who refuse to believe that the OTHER skater won fair and square, and therefore create specially edited slow-mo videos that are supposed to support their delusion. They are the equivalent of the birther movement in the skating world. The people who made them are pathetic.